"Variations on a theme of a straight line" by Michael Templeton
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
I am writer and accidental nomad poet. After years of wandering in the academy, and more years of wandering in the kitchen, I now live and work in the Middle of Nowhere, Ohio. I write books, apoems, essays, experimental essays, and plays. I also work as a freelance writer, mostly for non-profits.
On the side of a rural state route, two signs situated so as to make it possible for one to read them when passing by at 60 MPH, explain the differences between capitalism and socialism, and the choice is clear: it is a straight line to poverty and a God-less hell and damnation with socialism—a straight line straight as a rural state route in the American Midwest through God’s only begotten nation fitted with the Eternal Glory of God on the Highest, the bounty of which is in evidence all about you on either side of this straight line past the corn, soy beans, the grain elevator, the small towns empty and dying from the inanition of abandonment where the old wait to die, the young leave, or they die the sickening death of heroin addiction finding their way to Jesus with a regular script of methadone, where the drive-through beer outlet and cheap tobacco sits next to the drive-through burgers and tacos, past the Dollar General and the new church inside the old abandoned department store, and it is here that the meek do not inherit the earth or anything at all, and those who have strayed from the straight line can expect all the torments of
Hell.
But how should we measure up?
Even as we flatten, divide, and subdivide across all available space (we no longer build upward anymore as we have found that the wide open space offers greater possibilities; the terrain, the territory is easily assimilated into new forms of access and valorization and therefore easily deterritorialized and reterritorialized. What occurs on the flat and straight body of the earth is this endlessly positive force in which “(e)very stratum operates… by grasping in its pincers a maximum number of intensities or intensive particles over which it spreads its forms and substance, constituting determinate gradients and thresholds of resonance (deterritorialization on a stratum always occurs in relation to a complementary reterritorialization)” (Deleuze and Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus, 54). All of this is to explain that the new model modes of appropriation and exploitation of the land is by way of the straight line across the line as opposed to the slow movement upward from the land. And whereas the land is filled with intensities of immanent use (value) and intensive particles of nutrient rich earth, the invisible machines of capitalism (remember the sign along the state route) are moving beneath our feet and just below the surface of approximately six inches of topsoil to deterritorialize the earth toward its absolute deterritorialization where it will find that explosive and implosive variable we speak of above, and it is here, it is within this system of underlying strata onto which still more invisible modes of modulations and determinations will form the system by which we measure up.
Section 2. Required: Self-Disclosure Questions for ALL convictions and pending charges from any state or jurisdiction. You must answer Questions 11A through 14. Attach Page 2 if you have crimes or pending charges. SEE INSTRUCTIONS.
11A. Have you been convicted of any crime? If yes complete Page 2 Section 3. Lord Jesus Christ, who reproduced in the flesh of the most blessed Francis
11B. Do you have charges (pending) against you for any crime? If yes complete Page 2. Section
4. the sacred marks of your own sufferings
12. Has a court or state agency ever issued you an order or other final notification stating that you have sexually abused, physically abused, neglected, abandoned, or exploited a child, juvenile, or vulnerable adult? so that in a world grown cold our hearts might be filled with burning love of you
13. Has a government agency ever denied, terminated, or revoked your contract or license for failing to care for children, juveniles, or vulnerable adults; or have you ever given up your contract or license because a government agency was taking action against you for failing to care for children, juveniles, or vulnerable adults? graciously enable us by his merits and prayers to bear the cross without faltering and to bring forth worthy fruits of penitence
14. Has court ever entered any of the following orders against you for abuse, sexual abuse, neglect, abandonment, domestic violence, exploitation, or financial exploitation of a vulnerable adult, juvenile, or child?
Permanent vulnerable adult protection order/restraining order, either active or expired RCW 74.34.
Sexual assault protection order under RCW 7.90.
Permanent civil anti-harassment protection order, either active or expired, under RCW 10.14.
You who are God, living and reigning with God the Father, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, for ever and ever. Amen.
…and we must determine standards of measure which are consistent with our divided states on and along the straight road. That sign—those signs on the old straight state route offer an ideal starting point by which we may begin to become imperceptible.
We will not enter the straight line. Instead, we are permeated through and through with the straight line. We embody the straight line as we are entered into the straight line, as we are insinuated into the new order, which is the ideal order insofar as it encompasses and anticipates all manner of disorder as part of the order. Still, we are living beings with something of a will, and as such it is incumbent upon us to adhere and conform to the straight lines which we have taken on according to our own free will. Do we not have a responsibility to those we have freely entered into contractual relations with in order to gain access to all that the new systems have to offer us? Certainly, as free individuals, or perhaps as free dividuals split off from the social into our own singular monadic entrepreneurial entities, we must adhere to those expectations, reasonable as they are, to make good on our ends of these bargains. 1 And in order to do this, in order that we may become the kinds of beings who may be offered entry into the relation, we must “assume the way of life (consumption, work, public spending, taxes, etc.) compatible with reimbursement” (Lazzarato. The Making of Indebted Man, 31). We must do this so that we may become the measure of our own worth. Just as once the gold traded in the markets had to be held to metallurgical standards, and the trade in currency had to be stabilized against banking systems that were strong enough to ensure that the currency held value, so now we must, as singular individuals, be worthy of the value entrusted in us by the relation in which “man himself, instead of metal or paper, has become the mediator of exchange, not however as man, but as a mode of existence of capital and interest” (59). And with this we have found our way, according to the dictates of the sign on the straight old rural state route, into the relation that is the straight line.
We have become the essence of value within modes of capitalism that skim along the surface of the earth at the speed of light as the machines of absolute deterritorialization convert the land into all that we desire. These the sacred ones, these the ones who are outside the margin, who are on either side of the line but are never on any side of the line, and they are always invisible to us, even though they
1 These entities with which we enter into various relations are to be treated in the way we treat our neighbors. They are individuals in the same sense as the person next door or who you may come in contact with any kind of regularity and to whom you owe that minimum of decency which not only includes the business of making good on our debts, but also conducting yourself as a moral and ethical individual, one who will not bring shame or dishonor on us all. These entities, even though they are enormous corporate banking structures that exceed national borders and operate on a level that cannot properly be described, are to be understood as human, as having feelings and a personal investment in you and your world. While these entities will take complete control of our lives, and the lives of everyone associated with us, are our masters.
They own us and control us, but they are, after all, alive and complete. As Deleuze explained:
“We are taught that corporations have a soul, which is the most terrifying news in the world. The operation of markets is now the instrument of social control and forms the impudent breed of our masters” (Deleuze. “Postscript on the Societies of Control”, 6) are completely apparent to anyone with eyes to look and ears to hear, and they are always right beside everything that happens. No matter the forms of movement, no matter the speeds of movement, no matter the intentions of those who now make up the interior of these spaces, the spaces newly carved out of dust and water and the foliage so easily scrapped by blades and smoke. Fences and roads—straight roads, roads that transport enormous vehicles at fantastic speeds… still they come. These sacred men, outside all law and outside the sight of God, marked as they are with the brands of the slaves of some far off and distant form of divinity that carries no weight around here, therefore whatever claims they may have had are null and void, and their sacred status is of the unclean. They are stained with something we cannot fathom, but we know by their brands that they carry marks of defilement. Silent, but never still. Always moving from one point to another for reasons beyond anyone’s understanding. They wander. They form into small groups then disperse. They remain always just beyond the boundaries in a no place or same place but different place… these sacred men who wait. Perhaps that is all they are ever meant to do is wait. And waiting as they do they can never approach what anything that one could wait for. What is awaited must always be beyond in a beyond that cannot fall into the proximate.
Waiting in the exterior beyond the proximate in the space of the sacred where death and defilement can be free—where what is free is truly free, and as such, must never be taken in within the realms of the relation. Freedom is the space of death and the sacred, and these sacred men have been discharged to live the space of freedom beyond the relation, beyond in the beyond never approaching what is to be awaited.
Understand the mark on the body as the brand of sovereignty. It is the sovereign mark of that which owns you, takes over control of your destiny. But also understand this mark as the outward sign of the wound. The machines tear flesh; they cut to incise the mark, and the sign is the shape of the scar. Since the meaning of the sign is in its living vividness, it must be torn open each time it is read, each time the sovereign demands that the sacred ones be read and interpreted. Sacred words are by definition esoteric words. Knowledge of the sign of the wound, of the stigmata, is an occult and esoteric form of understanding. There is something of a priestcraft to the discerning of the stigmata. We must bear in mind that the stigmatic is sacred and carries the double weight of being marked off by divinity and simultaneously dangerously unclean. The stigmatic must be treated following a strict protocol. This is one reason why those who bear the stigmata, the sacred ones, wander the streets and roads far removed from ordinary life. And they are kept separate and apart according to strict protocols.
Small variations can emanate from within rigorously defined and demarked patterns. All will be set on a defined course, and the course will immediately be experienced as something that came from within. The crowds will enter the course and the loop as if it were a natural set of movements. Even the problem of accidents is entered into the formal structure of the course and the loop. What is more, the very idea of stepping outside of the course and the loop is contained within the course and the loop. All of this will extend until we lose the entirety of the outside.
Not only is there nothing outside, there is no outside. That has always been the goal. But there are problems within the course and the loop that the over-arching and underpinning structure (the loop itself) cannot account for or contain. It cannot contain these complications because they emanate from within the loop itself, and these problems, these complications begin and consist of small variations. The variations on Satie’s Vexations will serve. We—we the sacred—will play our Vexations 840 times, and when we are finished, we will begin again, and as according to the spirit, if not the letter, of the Maestro, we will introduce a small variation into the cycle of all 840
Vexations. The variation itself does not matter. All that matters is that the variation be small and gradual.
The organ plays on playing the mysterious hymn and the drum plays on playing the mysterious rhythm.
The organ plays on playing the mysterious hymn and the drum plays on playing the mysterious rhythm.
The organ plays on playing the mysterious hymn and the drum plays on playing the mysterious rhythm.
The organ plays on playing the mysterious hymn and the drum plays on playing the mysterious rhythm.
The organ plays on playing the mysterious hymn and the drum plays on playing the mysterious rhythm.
The organ plays on playing the mysterious hymn and the drum plays on playing the mysterious rhythm.
The organ plays on playing the mysterious hymn and the drum plays on playing the mysterious rhythm.
The organ plays on playing the mystery hymn and the drum plays on playing the mysterious rhythm.
The organ plays on playing the mystery hymn and the drum plays on playing the mystery rhythm.
The organ plays the mystery hymn and the drum plays the mystery rhythm.
The organ plays the mystery and the drum plays the mystery.
The organ plays and the drum plays the mystery.
The organ and the drum play the mystery.
organ and drum play the mystery.
organ and drum play the mystery
organ and drum play mystery
organ and drum mystery
organ and drum
organ drum
Your problem is that you simply will not follow along. You are not staying on task. All you need to do is this one simple thing. You are not following through. You are not listening. You are not.
You are.